GetResponse Review - Versatility on a Budget

Robert Brandl

Jan 14, 2019

GetResponse claim to be the easiest newsletter tool available, with a tonne of pro features. This is a big claim, especially as their prices are so competitive. The Polish-based company’s global reach extends to 182 countries, and claim to engage over 1 billion subscribers every month! That’s a lot of emails.

Feature-wise, they do boast a lot more than most other email marketing services. From simple A/B testing, to custom landing pages; comprehensive design testing to video email marketing.

The landing page feature, for example, is one-of-a-kind for newsletter tools, especially for one that offers so many customization options. Another feature that’s worth mentioning is their automation, allowing for advanced automated campaigns based on triggers/conditions such as sales or even location. Other tools offer automation, but most are not as powerful or user-friendly.

On higher-tier plans, you also get access to their webinar feature, as well as an inbuilt CRM - extras you don’t commonly see in email marketing platforms. It was certainly enough to capture our interest - and, eventually, our business (we now use GetResponse for many of our automated campaigns). So let’s take a deeper dive into this tool.

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Pros and Cons

More powerful than most tools, GetResponse’s list automation allows you to add many conditions to help segment your subscriber list automatically.

Landing page editor:

Quite rare amongst newsletter tools, but not only do they have a landing page editor, it’s also easy to use and allows you to do A/B testing with your designs.

Design and spam testing:

Both useful and easy to use, this can often be a feature that either costs a bomb, or just plain doesn’t work with other tools. GetResponse got it right.

Templates look dated:

While they do offer a lot of choice, the templates do look kind of dated and could do with an update.

Is GetResponse the right newsletter service for you?

Recommended if:

You want to capture customer leads:

GetResponse is one of the few newsletter tools we’ve tested that’s truly built for inbound. It offers flexible forms, a landing page editor, Google Analytics integration, and sophisticated automation for segmentation and emails, allowing you to both capture and nurture new leads. On top of that, it’s even possible to host webinars with them.

You’re an ecommerce:

If you’re an online store owner, GetResponse is packed with features to help you drive more sales – integrations with platforms like Magento and Shopify, abandoned cart campaigns, dynamic email content (e.g. based on purchases), and sales tracking. These are available from the PRO plan and upwards.

You need sophisticated automation:

We were impressed with GetResponse’s workflow builder, which enables you to set up automations for a whole range of actions, including sending emails, assigning lead scores, contact tagging, segmentation and data updates.

Not recommended if:

You need solid deliverability rates:

Deliverability should be an important consideration for any email marketer. GetResponse had some room for improvement in our deliverability tests. Of course, deliverability rates can always change, so we’re hoping this will improve in the future.

Rating details

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Ease of Use

Mostly easy to navigate using the icon-based upper menu, with the majority of relevant functions sitting under the ‘Email marketing’ menu option. Widgets can be added to or removed from the dashboard, giving you full control to manage your dashboard views. One small thing they could improve is to make it a little easier to navigate out of the email editor.

Newsletter Creation

Editor

The drag and drop editor is user-friendly, allowing for a wide range of email types. In fact, the editor is perhaps more flexible than most other tools – the range of options for editing might take a bit of practice though. Bonus points for including undo/redo buttons and a revision history. Our main gripe is the lack of a central style editor. It would be handy to set fonts and colors for the entire newsletter.

Personalization

You can personalize subject lines and email text using contact field data (and specify fallbacks if this data doesn’t exist for a particular contact), but it requires a tiny bit of if/then/else coding.

Some of the designs could do with an update, but there is a lot of choice and all of them are responsive. It’s easy to use and edit the templates. We couldn’t find an easy way to add columns to templates, though.

Email Automation

With GetResponse’s powerful and flexible workflow editor, you can build some pretty complex automated sequences. Aside from being able to send series of emails based on specified conditions and triggers, there are also rules to move subscribers from one list to another. Automations for lead scoring, abandoned cart campaigns, and web event tracking are also available. More on email automation.

List Management

GetResponse’s list management capabilities are superb. You can use custom filters to save segments of contacts with similar characteristics (e.g. based on contact field data, email engagement, or lead scores). Through automations, you’ve got the ability to add tags, and even automate list management rules. There’s also a section dedicated to list hygiene, allowing you to create rules for deleting and blacklisting contacts.

Registration Forms/ Opt-in & Opt-out- Process

Fairly easy to use, with many templates available, or the ability to create your own. There are several types of integration available: you can embed on your site or host the form on GetResponse. Options to edit thank you pages and the backend (e.g. which lists to add subscribers to) are a little hidden, though.

Deliverability

GetResponse’s deliverability leaves room for improvement. In our last tests over 15% of their emails were flagged as spam. They had a real challenge to make it into Outlook and Hotmail emails. If you are looking for a solid tool and a better performer, ActiveCampaign would be a better choice.

Reports and Analysis

Thorough reports, with geo-tracking available and desktop vs. mobile. You can also see which clients were used, as well as when people clicked and opened emails in a chart view. You can get all the details of the openers and clickers, as well as Google Analytics integration, and conversion/ecommerce tracking. There’s even an option to compare the performance of different campaigns; however, there is no heatmap available.

Languages

Available in up to 25 languages.

Further Features

Spam- and Design-Testing

Inbox testing is available on the site, allowing you to see the design in many different browsers and devices. You can also view the email’s SpamScore, which is a rating from 0-5 of how likely your email will be recognized as spam.

Bounce Management

Located within their ‘list hygiene’ section. Hard bounces are removed immediately from your lists, while soft bounces are removed after four unsuccessful attempts.

Blacklist

Both a blacklist and suppression lists are available. Manual import, but no export options available.

Storage available for data and images

1 Gigabyte

Apart from being able to add your own files, you also have over 1,000 stock photos available for use.

Pro Features

Authentication

SPF and DKIM are supported. They are apparently whitelisted by major clients (AOL, Yahoo, Outlook etc.)

Own Domain

This is only available on the ‘Enterprise’ plan. You can assign your own domains/subdomains to landing page URLs.

Different levels of account access

The ‘Pro’ plan allows up to 3 users, while the ‘Max’ plan allows up to 5. On top of this, you can buy multi-user add-ons for $20 per month, adding another 5 users. There’s no specific access levels, but you can define specific access areas for each user.

Integrations

Quite a few available, including all the big tools from ecommerce, CRM, social and CMS (Shopify, Magento, Salesforce, Facebook, WordPress etc).

Landing Page Editor

This is a strength of GetResponse, as they have a simple editor that allows you to make unique landing pages for events registration, webinars, downloads, thank you pages etc. There are over 110 templates, and A/B testing and responsive design are also available. The Email plan comes with 1 landing page; unlimited landing pages are available from the PRO plan and above.

Support

4/5

Via e-mail and live chat, support was very quick, friendly and helpful. The knowledge base is thorough and easy to navigate.

Overall rating

4.5/5

GetResponse is a very powerful, versatile and user-friendly newsletter tool. It’s also good value for the amount of features available. Deliverability could be better, though.

Conclusion

GetResponse really came through with the goods, managing to provide both the features and ease-of-use that most other newsletter tools fall short of. We also noted the great automation mechanisms for list management, as well as its flexible and intuitive automation workflows..

While the editor can be a little fiddly when performing certain tasks, and the templates look a little dated, they’re responsive and still good enough to create something useful. There’s even an app for iOS and Android that allows you not only to track, but also to send newsletters on the go.

With its long list of powerful features like landing pages and even webinars, GetResponse is certainly doing quite a few things right. While it would be great to see an uplift in deliverability rates, GetResponse scores extremely well in most other areas. As an email marketing tool, it’s definitely versatile enough to perform almost everything you’d need. We certainly found this to be true in our case for EmailToolTester’s own email campaigns, and it’s a tool we’d have few reservations about recommending to others.

GetResponse Alternatives

SendinBlue

ActiveCampaign

MailerLite

SendinBlue is a budget-friendly email marketing solution. We like their registration forms, which are flexible and have room for personalization. Their automations are also smart, and they should be enough for most users.

ActiveCampaign stands out for being one of the platforms with smarter automations. They are not only very powerful, but also straightforward to use. Their deliverability rates are also impressive, especially when compared to Get Response’s.

MailerLite is one of the cheaper providers. But don’t let their low price fool you – they offer a top notch tool. For example, they have modern-looking templates, solid automation features and remarkable deliverability rates.

FAQ

Where does GetResponse host their customer's data?

How Is My Data Protected?

GetResponse provides an “Agreement on Data Processing”. The form is based on Polish data protection policies; after all, GetResponse is based in Poland.

Due to the EU’s unification of rules governing data protection, the Polish rules are likely very similar to the strict ones you may know from other EU countries such as Germany or France. More information on data protection.

About Robert Brandl

This review was written by Robert Brandl. He has years of email marketing experience under his belt. First he supported larger cooporations before he started EmailToolTester, his passion project. There he helps small and medium-sized businesses find the right newsletter service.